The mode of clearing and planting is to fell the trees, and burn once what will burn, then cut them up into suitable lengths, roll... into heaps, and burn again; then, with a hoe, plant potatoes where you can come at the ground between the stumps and charred logs; for a first crop the ashes suffice for manure, and no hoeing being necessary the first year. In the fall, cut, roll, and burn again, and so on, till the land is cleared; and soon it is ready for grain, and to be laid down.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Mine was, as it were, the connecting link between wild and cultivated fields; as some states are civilized, and others half-civili...zed, and others savage or barbarous, so my field was, though not in a bad sense, a half-cultivated field. They were beans cheerfully returning to their wild and primitive state that I cultivated, and my hoe played the Ranz des Vaches for them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

How long shall we sit in our porticoes practising idle and musty virtues, which any work would make impertinent? As if one were to... begin the day with long-suffering, and hire a man to hoe his potatoes; and in the afternoon go forth to practise Christian meekness and charity with goodness aforethought!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

As I drew a still fresher soil about the rows with my hoe, I disturbed the ashes of unchronicled nations who in primeval years liv...ed under these heavens, and their small implements of war and hunting were brought to the light of this modern day.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

The weapons with which we have gained our most important victories, which should be handed down as heirlooms from father to son, a...re not the sword and the lance, but the bushwhack, the turf-cutter, the spade, and the bog hoe, rusted with the blood of many a meadow, and begrimed with the dust of many a hard-fought field. The very winds blew the Indian's cornfield into the meadow, and pointed out the way which he had not the skill to follow. He had no better implement with which to intrench himself in the land than a clamshell. But the farmer is armed with plow and spade.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

... often in the heat of noonday, leaning on a hoe, looking across valleys at the mountains, so blue, so close, my only conscious ...thought was, "How can I ever get away from here? How can I get to where they have books, where I can be educated?" I worked hard, always waiting for something to happen to change things. There came a time when I knew I must make them happen; that no one would do anything about it for me. And I did.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Who are our true rulers? The Negro poets, to be sure. Do they not set the fashion, and give laws to the public taste? Let one of t...hem, in the swamps of Carolina, compose a new song, and it no sooner reaches the ear of a white amateur, than it is written down, amended (that is, almost spoilt), printed, and then put upon a course of rapid dissemination, to cease only with the utmost bounds of Anglo-Saxondom, perhaps with the world. Meanwhile, the poor author digs away with his hoe, utterly ignorant of his greatness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »